After Cannabis, Quebec Lawmakers Considering Raising Drinking Age

Quebec’s center-right Coalition Avenir Québec party surged to its first ever majority government in this year’s provincial election. And one of CAQ’s first orders of business was to follow through on its campaign promise to increase the legal age minimum for buying, possessing and using cannabis in Quebec. Yesterday, the CAQ government introduced a bill to both raise the age of majority for cannabis to 21 and prohibit all public cannabis consumption. One of the bill’s major backers, CAQ junior health minister Lionel Carmant, told the media he would have liked to see the age limit raised to 25, following studies that suggest cannabis can damage brain neurons until a person is 25. And in an interview Thursday morning, Carmant added that Quebec should consider raising its legal drinking age, too.

Quebec’s New Health Minister Wants to Raise Age Minimums for Drinking and Cannabis

When Canada’s federal government in Ottawa passed the historic Cannabis Act on October 17, it adopted the minimum age recommended by the government’s cannabis task force: 18. But the law also gives provincial authorities the power to set their own age limits, so long as they don’t fall below 18. Most provinces adopted the federal task force’s